gleamed and the flames crackled round them on every side. Lamentable to behold, in the midst of the streets lay the tops of lofty towers, tumbled to the ground, stones of high walls, holy altars, fragments of human bodies, covered with livid spots of coagulated blood, looking as if they had been squeezed together in a press.
Judging the writing of another age and in another language is always difficult. But this passage, though it may borrow from Classical models, is, to my ear at least, no mere rhetorical exercise but a piece of vivid war reporting. And it still chills.
As also does Gildas’s description of the consequences. The survivors, who had managed to flee, soon faced either starvation or death from the elements. In this extremity, some surrendered to the invaders, to be killed or enslaved at their pleasure. Others fled abroad. While others took refuge among the mountains, forests and cliffs of the west of the island.
Gildas’s account is, for once, history written by the losers. But the story did not change much when Bede came to rewrite it two and a half centuries later from the perspective of the victors. Bede supplies a date – ‘in the year of Our Lord 449, Martian being made Emperor with Valentinian’ – for Vortigern’s invitation to the Saxons. And he gives the names of the Saxon leaders: ‘Hengist’ and ‘Horsa’. But the date is clearly the result of intelligent guesswork while, with his usual scrupulousness, he qualifies the statement about Hengist and Horsa with the warning: these ‘are said to have been’ their names.
Where Bede is useful instead is in his account of the ethnography of the invasions. For he is clear that the Saxons were only one of several distinct German peoples to invade Britain, each of whom settled in a different part of the old Roman province.
Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany – Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons [Wessex] who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight. From the Saxons, that is, the country which is now called Old Saxony, came the East Saxons, the South Saxons, and the West Saxons [that is, the peoples of Essex, Sussex and Wessex]. From the Angles, that is, the country which is called Anglia, and which is said, from that time, to remain desert [i.e. unpeopled] to this day, between the provinces of the Jutes and the Saxons, are descended the East Angles, the Midland Angles, Mercians, all the race of the Northumbrians, that is, of those nations that dwell on the north side of the River Humber, and the other nations of the English.
Bede’s account was a product of the best antiquarian scholarship of his own day. And it has been confirmed, in astonishing detail, by modern archaeology. Cremation urns of the same type, and probably indeed by the same potter, have been found in Wehden, Lower Saxony, and Markshall, Norfolk. Grave-goods discovered in both places, especially bracteates (decorated discs of gold), likewise confirm that there was a close connection between Kent and Jutland on the west coast of Denmark. The author is even right about the depopulation of Angeln, the homeland of the Angles. There rising sea-levels made long-established villages uninhabitable and their populations joined, almost certainly, in the emigration to Britain.
But, beyond these broad outlines, it is remarkably difficult to go. True, the much later compilation known as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle does appear to give a detailed account of the conquest with dates and battles. But it is easy to show that the Chronicle narrative is riddled with repetitions, inconsistencies and glaring omissions. It is also shot through with formulaic foundation legends (the landing parties almost always sail in three ships) and mythical genealogies (almost all the royal houses spring from the Anglo-Saxon god Woden). In view of this, the best that can be said is that the invaders first settled on the coast and then penetrated inland along navigable rivers and Roman roads. The broad movement was from east to west and south to north. But it was patchy, often slow and faced occasional serious reverses, like the Battle of Mount Badon, in which the British, led by Ambrosius Aurelianus, whom Gildas calls the sole survivor of ‘the Roman nation’ in Britain, inflicted a heavy defeat on the Anglo-Saxons, probably in the ad 490s. The area around Luton and Aylesbury in the modern Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire did not fall till ad 571 and Bath not till six years later, after the battle of Dyrham. And there were pockets of resistance even in the east – such as Verulamium, the site of the death of the proto-martyr, St Alban, and the principal cultic centre of British Christianity, or the little British kingdom of Elmet in the modern Yorkshire – which held out longer still.
By the end of the sixth century, however, the future political geography of Britain was becoming clear. The Britons had held on to the territories to the north of Hadrian’s Wall, to Cumbria and to the west of the Severn and Wye valleys, while the Anglo-Saxons had conquered everything to the east and to the south.
Give or take a little, these are the approximate frontiers of modern England.
III
We tend to think of the Norman Conquest as the turning point in the history of England. But the Saxon Conquest was even more important, since it created both the reality and the idea of England itself. Indeed, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the scale of the Saxon incursions. Perhaps 200,000 people flooded into a native population which by then had been reduced by raids, famine and disease to less than two million. Proportionately, it was the largest immigration that Britain has ever known. Moreover, as most of the incomers were men, it quickly turned from immigration into conquest. In the areas of densest Anglo-Saxon settlement, in the east and the Midlands, DNA evidence shows that up to ninety per cent of the native male population was displaced – they were driven west or killed – and their women, their villages and their farms taken over by the incomers. This was ethnic cleansing at its most savagely effective.
And it was not only blood that changed. The Anglo-Saxon immigrants imposed their own language: Old English. Most former places of habitation – towns, villages and villas – were abandoned and new ones established, to which new, English names were given. They also gave new names to natural features, such as mountains and rivers and woods. And they remade as well as renamed the landscape. In the fullness of time, they even gave the country they had conquered a new name: Britannia became the land of the Angles or Ængla Land.
This immigration at the point of the sword led to an outcome that was unique in the former territories of the Empire. For the sack of Rome in ad 410 had been followed sixty years later by the fall of the Empire itself in the west in ad 476. Nevertheless, in most places – in Italy and what were to become France and Spain – things continued pretty much as before. The cities with their bishops survived; ‘senatorial’ aristocrats continued to entertain each other in their opulent villas; the trade routes to the East remained open. The difference was that in place of the emperor, barbarian German leaders took over the imperial role. They divided it and localized it. But they kept all of the wealth, pomp and authority they could. For it was that which had made Rome such a magnet in the first place.
Even the Visigoths, who had sacked Rome, got in on the act. ‘At first’, Athaulf, the Visigothic king is reported as saying, ‘I ardently desired that the Roman name should be obliterated.’ But then he realized his mistake. ‘I have therefore chosen the safer course of aspiring to the glory of restoring and increasing the Roman name by Gothic vigour.’ Athaulf ’s lineage did not survive. But his aspirations did. The result was that, throughout the continental provinces of the Empire, a hybrid sub-Roman society continued to propagate Roman and Christian ideas of politics under the rule of Germanic kings; Roman buildings, such as churches and palaces, were still put up to enrich their capitals; their new Germanic nobility retained the names of the senior Roman military ranks – comes or count and dux or duke – as aristocratic titles; and, above all, Latin – if increasingly debased and diluted – continued to be the spoken and written language, used by the invaders and the native populations alike.
But in Britannia it was a different story. Here the fall of Rome really marked the end of Romanness. Despite their height and strength, the walls of Rutupiae (Richborough) and the other forts of the Saxon Shore were overwhelmed and abandoned. So were the walled towns. And their ruin marks the ruin of Britain. Or at least it marks the annihilation of everything that was Roman about Britain: the law, the language, the literature, the religion and the politics all vanished.